


when you need the devil

by deniigiq



Series: Dumpster Fires Verse [20]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Exhaustion, Gen, Hunting, Implied/Referenced Terrorism, M/M, Sam accidentally joins Team Red casually, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team Red, Team as Family, and that mission requires the devil, but the devil need a nap, sam's on a mission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-03 12:25:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16326206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: Sam was pretty sure the guy on the other side of the line was having a breakdown. Wilson hung up and peeled the post-it away from its cousins. He held it out to Sam.“You got your meeting,” he said, “But I’m giving you fair warning, he ain’t gonna be coherent. You want any use out of him, you’ll have to pin him down somewhere flat for at least an hour or two.”A nap.He had to make the fucking Devil of Hell’s Kitchen take a nap.(Sam Wilson needs the Devil for a mission but the Devil's nowhere to be found. Sam has to go through Wade and Peter to get ahold of him)





	when you need the devil

**Author's Note:**

> folks on tumblr were asking me about how team red relates to the avengers. i am here with an example.

Sam was on the hunt for the Devil and if his mom had anything to say about it, he would be damned before he found him.

Pete had sworn up and down the guy wasn’t actually a Satanist, rather an almost overly exuberant Catholic with a handful of anger issues. Which, given what Sam knew about his local star-spangled Catholic, made complete and utter sense.

Steve’s defense was that it was his God-given right to be angry whenever he so damned pleased. Sam was going to give it a F for content and an A for effort.

Peter had also said that his pal wasn’t hot on the Avengers. Well. Stark in particular, and the others more or less. Sam had researched the guy extensively (through his morons) and met him exactly once, and again. He could totally see that.

The Devil was erratic. He fought and twisted and hissed and planned according to his own rules, on his own turf. He didn’t leave the Kitchen much and he didn’t get involved in other peoples’ shit. He evidently expected others to reciprocate these terms and conditions or suffer the consequences.

It was, in a weird kind of way, almost polite.

Sam had learned via survey that if you or anyone else got fucked over in the Kitchen, Daredevil threw all his chips into your corner, regardless of who you were or why you were there. Sure, he might chase you out of the Kitchen as soon as you caught your breath, but you could count on him to come running at the first call.

Unless you were a Name in the super community.

If you were a Name, you could bet your ass that the second you set foot into Hell’s Kitchen, you weren’t leaving it without some minor stalking and a couple off-handed, or hell, heavy-handed, entreaties to get the fuck out. If you were lucky. Hawkeye testified to this, as did Wanda and Barnes. Barnes reported, with far too much interest for Sam’s comfort, that once, when he had been scoping out a target for a job, the Devil had come flying out of nowhere to punt his rifle right off the fucking building.

He’d mistaken Barnes to be the Punisher, apparently. Barnes had been delighted. He said that the devil had apologized only for mistaking him to be Frank Castle. The gun, which Sam remembered being fucked right to hell, went disregarded.

Pete swore he was the nicest guy once you got to know him.

Sam decided to let this be seen.

 

 

Sam had asked Peter where his buddy liked to hang out and his answer was “I dunno, he doesn’t hang out with me. He’s got a couple perches, though.”

Sam had to remind himself that he was once again among his brethren. The bird people. Or at least, air support.

Peter directed him to four different perches around Hell’s Kitchen and Hawkeye supplied a further two. They were not what Sam had been expecting and they were, understandably, bereft of Devil activity during the day.

The Devil, Sam concluded, had to be a trash panda or a fucking possum or something. His perches were either stupid high up, the kind which required Spidey’s level of balance to not fall and die a horrible death from, or they were just shitholes. Little ledges covered in graffiti, cigarette butts, and pigeon shit. In these spaces, Sam could find evidence of the Devil in the form of handprints of dried, smeared blood on the very edges of the concrete and metal barriers keeping the resident normals from taking a tumble while they had their smoke.

He resolved to come back to the ones which had the most-recently looking dried blood on them that night.

He didn’t wear the gear, so word wouldn’t spread that the Falcon was in Hell’s Kitchen, but the Devil didn’t show.

He waited for hours. He visited each perch, even the death-defying ones.

He ended up going home at 4am having not even caught a glimpse of Mr. Horn Head.

 

 

“He’s working a lot right now,” Peter explained when Sam cornered him for more information.

“What do you mean ‘working a lot?’”

“He’s got a day job that keeps him pretty busy. He didn’t come out with me and DP last weekend because of it.”

The guy worked weekends?

“Not usually. All he said was ‘t’is the season.’”

The fuck did that even mean? Was he an accountant? They had _months_ before taxes were due.

Peter didn’t have an answer for this one. He shrugged.

“DP says that people like to ruin each others’ Christmases. He said that it’s God’s will.”

They needed to get this child away from these fuckheads ASAP. No one, however, would listen to Sam, no matter how often he raised the alarm. Even Colonel Rhodes just sighed and said “Tony’s been working on it, but he hasn’t exactly found a justifiable reason to intervene yet.”

Bullshit.

Sam could find like eighty if you gave him five minutes. Starting, of course, with the fact that Deadpool was a motherfucking assassin and ending with the fact that Deadpool was a motherfucking assassin.

“So he’s been skipping night patrols?” he clarified to Peter. The kid bounced his head.

“But DP usually knows where he is when he’s being a real person. I think they’re real people friends, even though Double D says they aren’t.”

Double D at least had a brain in his skull then.

“What makes you think they’re real people friends?” Sam pressed gently, so as not to lose the only direct line to his infuriatingly illusive target.

Peter cocked his head.

“DP says they fucked until Red got his life together and fell in love with his best friend.”

So. There was a lot to unpack there.

‘Red’ was a complicated man with, apparently, a complicated job and an even more complicated love life.

Sam knew a thing or two about the devastating realization that you were in love with your best friend(s). It was basically agony. Not to mention super fucking dangerous. As soon as your heart decided to start pounding around your chosen vessel of misfortune, you were as good as painting a huge fucking target on them—two targets, actually. One right in the middle of their forehead and one plastered over their heart.

He’d learned that the hard way.

He also knew that he had to talk to Deadpool.

 

 

Finding Deadpool was easier than he expected, simply because Spidey took his arm and walked him right over to Deadpool’s fucking apartment. Wade Wilson answered the door looking, for all intents and purposes, like he hadn’t slept in a month. Sam didn’t know the guy well enough to know if that was his constant state of being or if he’d had an especially rough week.

Wade Wilson was actually a fairly laid back guy who seemed, if nothing else, begrudgingly fond of Peter. He didn’t throw the Deadpool persona on in front of him, so much as he kind of allowed it to do what it willed. He did, however, tell them to get fucked, that it was his day off. He groaned miserably when Peter ducked under his arm and squirmed past him into the apartment anyways.

“Where’s Bella?” Peter asked.

“I gutted her for violins,” Wilson spat after him. Peter made a delighted noise behind him and started cooing. Wilson gave Sam a long-suffering look and begrudgingly moved to allow him to enter.

 

 

Wilson’s apartment was what would happen if you took the best and worst of 80s and 90s punk, metal, and grunge and handed it to an interior designer with the instruction to ‘make maximum impact in minimum space.’

He had posters on his posters. He had kitsch on his kitsch. But surprisingly, the place was relatively clean, navigable, and, dare Sam say it, cozy.

Peter reappeared at the kitchen counter as Wade fished glasses out of his cabinet to offer Sam a drink.

“This is Bella,” Peter introduced, holding out an adolescent black kitten with huge yellow eyes and a blotch of white on her nose, “She was born here and didn’t like the church, so she came home.”

“You need a fucking cat?” Wilson asked over him.

Peter ignored him.

“Here, she’s really nice. Wade calls her Belladonna because—”

“She’s toxic.”

“But it’s like, totally ironic.”

The kitten purred in Sam’s stupefied arms. She was very soft. She climbed up onto his shoulder and draped herself around his neck. Peter was so pleased. Wilson took the moment to glare at him and then the cat, and then back to him.

Sam tried to get them back on track. It was hard with Bella rumbling in his ear.

She was very nice. Possibly the nicest cat Sam had ever met.

Wilson appeared to hate her with single minded passion, but he also removed Peter from the discussion by giving him ten bucks and producing a can of wet cat food from under the sink (‘the only kind the little bitch deigns to eat’ )and sending him off to fetch more of it.

Sam was no longer convinced he hated this cat.

“Why keep her if you hate her?” he asked once Peter had gone.

“I don’t fucking know,” Wade griped. “My girl would have lost her fucking shit over a kitten, though. And she _does_ match the décor, I guess.”

Oh.

The coziness made a lot more sense all of the sudden. Wade Wilson hadn’t lived in that apartment alone. It was an amalgamation of two people’s lives, one of which was, well. Past tense.

Sam stroked the kitten’s head as he asked where to find the Devil.

Wilson leaned the small of his back against the kitchen counter.

“Red? Nah, you ain’t gonna find him. He’s been working his ass off like a normal person. He’s had a landslide of clients in the last couple weeks ‘cause everyone in the fucking city’s gotta get evicted or assaulted or arrested just in time for the holidays, you know?”

“He a cop?” Sam asked.

Wilson snorted.

“Listen, he could use the fucking the sleep—we all can. Leave him alone.”

“I’ve got a job that requires his skill set.”

Wilson rolled his eyes.

“What’s the job?”

Huh. Interesting. They were friends enough that Wilson was willing take up the slack for the Devil if it came to it.

“I need help tracking a guy. He’s moving through the city fast. Keeps setting up explosive devices. It’s my understanding Daredevil’s got acute senses. Word is he’s better than a bloodhound.”

Wilson blew out a heavy breath and shook his head.

“You heard right,” he said. “I can make you as many bombs as you want, but I ain’t your guy for finding where I fucking left ‘em. Why don’t we do this: lemme call Red and see if he’s human yet. He is, I’ll set you two up on a date. He ain’t, you find someone else.”

That was shockingly fair and reasonable. Sam wondered if Deadpool was okay. He seemed a little depressed. But, true to his word he grabbed his phone and walked into another room for a few, leaving Sam to pet the cat butting her head against his neck and hands. Sam heard him start talking through the wall.

He caught snippet of the conversation that sounded like ‘you dead yet?’ and ‘got space for another?’ and ‘ever heard of a sniffer dog?’ followed by an explanation of a sniffer dog, which Sam took to mean that the Devil lived under a fucking rock wherever he was.

Wilson emerged from his bedroom with the phone still pressed to his ear. He snagged a pad of pink post-it notes from the edge of the kitchen island and wrote down whatever the Devil was saying to him, humming occasionally in affirmation.

“Hey, no offense,” he interrupted, “But you sure you’re up for this? You sound a little—”

Sam actually heard the hysterical laughing on the other side of the line. It died off as quickly as it started. Wilson looked…concerned.

“Yo, when was the last time you slept?” he asked.

More tinny laughing. Wilson huffed in amusement.

“Alright man, it’s your funeral. I’ll let him know.”

Sam was pretty sure the guy on the other side of the line was having a breakdown. Wilson hung up and peeled the post-it away from its cousins. He held it out to Sam.

“You got your meeting,” he said, “But I’m giving you fair warning, he ain’t gonna be coherent. You want any use out of him, you’ll have to pin him down somewhere flat for at least an hour or two.”

A nap.

He had to make the fucking Devil of Hell’s Kitchen take a nap.

Okay, fine. Whatever. He was the motherfucking Falcon. He could make a guy take a nap.

He took the post-it note and returned the cat. He shook hands with his fellow Wilson and found himself back on the street, on the heels of the Devil.

 

 

Not so much on the heels as much as on the knees.

“You need help?” the Devil slurred at him, practically swaying with the effort it took for him to remain upright.

He hadn’t fucked with his armor. He’d thrown on the black pajamas. He looked like he’s shaved recently, bizarrely, and Sam didn’t want to say anything, but he 100% smelled like aftershave. Whatever his day job was, he made himself pretty for it. Even if he did look like one good push would send him right over the edge. Whether that edge belonged to the roof they were standing on or the guy’s sanity was anyone’s guess.

“I got a guy planting bombs,” Sam explained.

“Oh _hell_ no,” the Devil mumbled, “I ain’t fuck with bombs. You take your bombs and—you take you bombs and—fuck, I dunno. Just leave ‘em. Just leave me.”

Sam wondered what the poor fuck was like when he was actually drunk, not just tired-drunk. He seemed to have a bit of a stammer. He sounded half as prim and proper as the last (and only other) time Sam had heard him talk.

“It doesn’t have to be tonight,” he clarified, “But I could really use the help, maybe this weekend?”

“Weekend?” the Devil repeated.  “What day is it?”

Good god, maybe he needed to take the guy with him to his real person work.

“Wednesday, listen—”

“Wednesday? Fuck, it’s _Wednesday_? It’s only Wednesday? Jesus Christ.”

He couldn’t stop himself.

“Man, what do you even do?” he asked. The Devil stopped in his swaying and wandering over around the edge of his perch. He jerked his face towards Sam and cocked his head.

“Save people?” he replied.

“No, like. In real life, what do you do in real life?”

“Oh,” the Devil said, entirely without his gravel. He sounded? Really polite? Good-natured even? “I work in an office. We do a lot of legal stuff.”

An office.

There was no way. Sam didn’t believe that shit for a second.

“You’re some kind of paper pusher,” he said flatly.

Daredevil shrugged.

“T’is the season,” he said.

“For _what_?” Sam snapped back, tired of hearing the phrase thrown around. The Devil cocked his head the other way as if mystified by his frustration.

“Why do you need me? Just get Nat to do it,” he slurred.

Why would he—

Wait.

“You know Nat?” he asked. It took the Devil several second of processing to realize that he’d made a fucking mistake.

“No.”

What the fuck.

“How do you know Nat?”

“I don’t know anyone.”

“No one,” Sam repeated.

“No one,” the Devil confirmed.

He could not lie. He could not lie to save his fucking soul. For fuck’s sake. They called this man the Devil?

“I dunno anyone,” the Devil reiterated.  “But as you can see, I’m obviously too fucked up for this job, so why don’t you ask someone on your team with a little less, uh, fucked-up-ness?”

Sam evaluated the guy. His face was slack and his hands weren’t bloody. He occasionally snapped his head out towards the city and kind of cocked it at several different angles, listening. Then, in a split second, he’d decide that whatever it was, was fine and return his attention to Sam before cycling through the whole process again.

He was obviously hearing shit all over the city, clearly enough to evaluate it for signs of trouble. And he could do that, even in his current state of misery and semi-inebriation.

He was exactly the guy for Sam’s job.

“No can do,” Sam told him, “How much you asking?”

“I didn’t ask anything?” The Devil pointed out, confused.

“No, asking. Like, how much do you want to get paid?”

“Paid?”

Dear Lord, help your poor lost lamb. Sam couldn’t.

‘Yeah, man. Paid. Like, we will give you money in return for your services.”

“You working with Castle?” Daredevil asked suspiciously.

Seriously?

“No, I’m _trying_ to work with you,” Sam said as patiently as he could. Some irritation bled in, but that wasn’t his fault. It was like trying to get an old dog to fetch a ball it had never seen in its life.

“Why do you wanna pay me?” The Devil persisted; Sam knew he was squinting even though he couldn’t see his eyes.

“Listen, uh, Double D—that's what they call you, right? I just—”

“I work pro-bono, how many hours you need?”

He what?

He worked _what?_

No fucking way.

There was no fucking way.

“You’re a _lawyer_?” Sam found himself sputtering.

Daredevil came back to himself for another second of clarity to realize that he’d fucked up royally again.

“No,” he snapped tightly.

“You’re an honest-to-god lawyer,” Sam realized joyously.

“Am not.”

“ _That’s_ how you know Nelson.”

“Who’s Nelson? How do you know Nelson?”

Oh, the poor baby. He needed a nap so fucking bad. Deadpool was so right. Sam snickered.

“Where do you live, pal? I’ll help you home. We can talk after you get some sleep.”

“I don’t need help. I’m fine. I don’t know anyone named Nelson.”

 “Sure, honey, whatever you say. Let’s get you home.”

 

 

Daredevil refused to give up his address, no matter how many times Sam promised him he wouldn’t spread his secrets. He was not impressed by Sam’s promises and he was getting progressively more prickly the longer he stayed in his presence.

Sam hated to admit it. No, that wasn’t true. Sam was so fucking happy to admit that the guy was kind of a dork. He was a little dopey under all that ire. Strip away the defenses and Sam could totally see him as a charmer and nerdy, over-enthusiastic man-of-the-people. Especially given Nelson.

If he was anything like Nelson, he was a puppy in there.

“I don’t know Nelson,” the Devil insisted for what had to be the fifteenth time as Sam dragged him back towards the heart of the Kitchen. He had half a mind to call Pete and ask him where he could drop him off, but he decided against it. Unfortunately for the Devil, Nelson had represented JB a handful of times over the last couple months as he worked his way through every police station in the city with his antics. Enough that Steve had worked out Nelson’s home address to send apology flowers to.

Nelson lived in Hell’s Kitchen, not too far from where they were currently, actually.  And the Devil seemed to realize, a few blocks away with Sam’s fist wrapped in the back of his sweatshirt, exactly where they were going. He doubled down on his exhausted, increasingly hysterical efforts to convince Sam that he’d never met Nelson in his life.

It was almost pathetic.

Sam wrestled him up the stairs of the building and knocked on the apartment door he remembered standing outside on a Sunday, pleading with Nelson to come get JB out of jail on his day off. True to form, Nelson opened the door, despite it being midnight.

He then did something Sam would treasure for all his days.

He looked at Sam, then looked at the Devil and dropped one hand to his hip and pressed the other to the space between his eyes. The Devil piped down and stopped trying to escape Sam’s grasp.

“Wow, who are you?” he blurted out.

“You’re such a fucking idiot,” Nelson countered in exasperation.

“I mean, I’m sure you’re very handsome, kind stranger.”

“Are you drunk? I’m sorry, is he drunk?” Nelson asked Sam. He didn’t know what to say. He’d been expecting a little less, well, routine reaction. There was no shock on Nelson’s face at all. Not even a trace of it.

Things started to click into place.

“ _This_ is your partner?” Sam clarified, shaking the Devil at him.

They’d been trying to find out for _weeks_. Ever since Nelson got Bruce out of trouble a few months back and had brought two different friends to two different events they’d invited him to, to return the favor. His partner, he’d explained upon being surreptitiously asked by the elected party of the night, couldn’t make it. His partner never seemed to be able to make it. Everyone in the Avengers had started placing bets on whether it was Karen Page, that gal from _The Bulletin_ Hogarth had convinced him to bring with him to the charity gig, or if it was one of his other vigilante clients, half of whom JB had dug out the court records on to scan for any signs of romantic inclinations.

Nelson told no one. Hogarth said she didn’t involve herself in her employees’ personal affairs. She also told Stark that he had his own team of very capable lawyers and she’d appreciate it if he would stopped stealing the guy she was trying to groom into a firm partner, please and thanks. That only increased the suspense.

But now, looking at the guy who seemed scrappy enough to chew off his own arm if that’s what Sam had been holding, he totally, _totally_ understood.

Nelson gave him a cool look and flicked his eyes down to the moron who’d half-wriggled out of his sweatshirt. He watched and pursed his lips.

“Depends on the next ten minutes,” he said. The Devil stopped wriggling around immediately.

“Nooooo,” he whined, “I didn’t mean to, Fogs. I just—Wade called me and—”

“Wade called you.”

The Devil backtracked.

“Wade didn’t call me,” he tried. Nelson hummed in interest.

“So you just found my client’s boyfriend on your own,” he clarified. The Devil backtracked further.

“I don’t even know who this guy is,” he said, gesturing.

Sam met Nelson’s eyes with what he hoped was enormous patience and empathy.

“He’s almost cute,” he noted. Nelson sighed.

“Come in,” he said, defeated.

 

 

The Devil was a soft-spoken guy named Matthew who, left alone for two minutes, crashed right the fuck out on Nelson’s couch.

“People are awful to each other around the holidays,” Nelson told Sam, holding out a cup of coffee. “Matty takes their cases because no one else will. He’s too Catholic to deny someone help with Jesus’s birthday around the corner.”

“How the fuck do you cope with this?” Sam asked, accepting the coffee and waving at the guy, 100% puppy now, curled up around Nelson’s couch cushions. Nelson touched his knee and he automatically tucked both of them up into himself so Nelson had room to sit.  

“Says the pot to the kettle,” he said.

Ouch. True though. At least his idiots were official.

“Okay, uh. How does this whole thing work?” he asked instead. Nelson chuckled.

“Why do you need Matt, Mr. Wilson?” he asked instead.

See? Good lawyer. Bad lawyer. They were a team.

Sam explained. Nelson nodded along. Halfway through, he looked away to watch Matthew’s shoulders rise and fall.

“That sounds like something he could do, yeah. Alright, fine. I’ll see if I can take some of his cases,” he said, which surprised Sam. That had not been a solution he’d thought of. Or one that he’d have expected Nelson to even offer.

“Provided that you can keep a secret,” Nelson finished, meeting Sam’s eyes.

Aha. Yeah, there was always a catch.

“You know what? Sure,” Sam said.

 

 

Daredevil was hideously embarrassed to be in Sam’s debt and furious that he’d been found out and that he’d been the main cause of that.

“If you tell anyone, I’ll break every bone in your body,” he hissed at Sam before bouncing off to go contort himself through the cracked window of a warehouse.

It was true. He was better than a bloodhound. He even brought the devices back.

 

 

Peter somehow already knew about Sam’s ordeal when he turned up the next week. He welcomed Sam to the club.

“Don’t worry,” he bubbled, “He’ll warm up to you. Mr. Nelson says he hates everything the first half an hour he encounters it. It took him like two whole months before he started talking to me in sentences, and you’re already there!”

Nope. Nope. Nope.

Not normal.

Not celebratory.

“Does this mean I have to be friends with Deadpool, too?” he whispered to the kid, making sure none of the other Avengers were around to hear it.

Peter hummed.

“No, Wade picks you to be friends, you don’t pick him. He wants to know if you can really talk to birds, though.”

What the fuck.

How had he learned that? Sam hadn’t told anyone since he was twelve.

“What the fuck are you guys?” he snapped as quietly as he could, as Banner had spotted them and had started their way looking frazzled.

“Team Red,” Peter informed him opaquely.

Yeah, thanks for clearing that up, pal.

“No, really. What are you?”

Peter blinked.

“Team Red,” he insisted.

And that was probably as accurate an answer as Sam could hope for.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
